


The Ghost In The Machine

by HalfshellVenus



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-25
Updated: 2010-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-10 06:33:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfshellVenus/pseuds/HalfshellVenus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lifetime ago, she and Derek used to be something more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghost In The Machine

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to the drabble "Haunted." Written for miss_mandy, and for writers_choice ("Remember").

They are partners now, allied in the mission to keep John Connor safe into the future. Years ago (a lifetime for one of them), they used to be something more.

There are places on Derek's body that she hasn't seen in years, scars and secret skin alike, hidden from the world, hidden from her. Logic tells her there must be new scars now, new secrets. Sometimes she wonders when and how they might have happened.

His eyes are different now. She cannot categorize it, but there used to be something else in the way he looked at her before. Images rise and scatter inside her—his arms crushing her to his chest, his hand on her breast, his lips against her thigh, the soft expression on his face when they were done. All those moments belonged to Allison, and yet they remain inside the robot that wears her face. Cameron pulls them up and turns them over, trying to match them against what she knows of who Derek is now, in this present that is also the past.

None of those pieces fit.

Her programming tells her that his face is aesthetically pleasing by human standards, but she remembers something different, another way of seeing that Allison alone understood. It drifts out of reach where Cameron cannot catch it, along with the name he no longer calls her.

Cameron is a machine that knows only algorithms and facts, and information learned from analyzing people and events. Behavior is a never-ending puzzle she can only predict.

Still, she is 97.5% certain that all these changes in Derek would have caused Allison Young to mourn.

 

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